It's been a long struggle after Window Update totally hosed my XP partition.  I have Norton Ghost 10 and 2003 and they would not boot from CD to enable a recovery.  Windows recovery and repair also failed, blue screen.  MS Tech told me it must be a hardware failure although stress testing with Five distributions of Linux showed otherwise.  I bought an IDE hard drive, as they are recognized before SATA, made it hd0 and have mostly completed the laborious task of rebuilding the system.  Most of my data was recoverable from the Ghost images in a backup partition on the original SATA drive.

My ideas and question:

Is it possible or advisable to clone the fresh and functioning C: WinXP partition on my IDE drive to the first primary partition of the SATA drive hd1 for a backup.  THEN, if I have a repeat of the described disaster, changing the boot sequence of my harddrives in the BIOS might give me a working system again. (I bet it's harder than just that.)

Would BootIt NG be useful?  Looks like it is capable of booting a back up copy of an OS from an alternate partition.

I am worried as this was the first time a system failure was unrecoverable with my backup and imaging software.  Secondly, I don't know what really happened that prevented booting from the Ghost CDs.  Originally, I suspected a virus infection but scrubbing from Linux rescue CDs, four different programs, showed all clean.

I feel I need a new backup strategy as Ghost 10 alone was not enough.  Any ideas would be appreciated. 

Thanks in advance.

Yes the Ghost 10 CD booted  and ran with the included nvidia sata driver.  I could read my Ghost back up files in a separate partition on the sata disk.  The 2003 disk required me to load the sata driver from a floppy disk, F6 I think, which worked but I never used 2003.

The first couple of times Windows update locked up my computer I was able to recover from the windows recovery console.  MS advised my to apply a patch then update windows xp.  As I remember it was the update to the windows update program that really hosed the system.

I could not boot Ghost 10 or 2003, I could not boot the Windows disk to repair mode, blue screen and error code that refered to hardware failure.  I believed that at first but what hardware?  MS knowledege base listed the codes but informed me it was impossible to tell where the failure was.

I booted Knoppix and could access all my files.  BIG OMISSION HERE! should have copied all my latest files from the Windows XP partition at this time.  I figured my Ghost partition would have all the files backed up.  At this time I partitioned unused space on the sata disk, installed Fedora Core 6 and did some serious stress testing of my system looking for the bad hardware.  All tested good and held up to compiling a custom kernel repeatedly with no errors. 

Now I suspected a virus so I downloaded Trinity Rescue, a linux based scrubber, and used four programs updated on the fly to search for malware.  All clean.

At this point I partitioned another slice of unused space and did a network install of Debian and looked for a rootkit virus, all clean.

I still can't get Ghost to run so I formated my first primary partition installed a fresh copy of XP.  Ghost now installs and I find out that Ghost has not been saving the newest versions of my Documents, the folders are empty!  Newest stuff is about 6 months old, about the time I started having trouble the the windows update and turned it off.

On MS advice I try to update my fresh install of XP and the same old lock up.

So maybe the MBR  or first partition is bad on the SATA disk.  I buy a new Antec PS 25% larger and a new IDE HD and reinstall XP.  It updates fine and I'm just about recovered except all the spreadsheets and contacts are 6 months behind.

That's the long ugly story and sure don't want to go through this again.

I have been searching your site for appropriate topics and I get the idea a second drive with windows os installed must be removed from the computer or the registry gets corrupted when one reboots after cloning.

So is cloning to a usb or firewire harddrive the answer?  Disconnect it and store off site for the day Windows goes south.  Or maybe a cheaper route would be to get a second IDE drive that matches the one I have, clone the entire drive to it and pull it out as a backup.

Maybe dropping back to Ghost 2003 is a better idea.  Since the problem seems windows centric, running the older program with DOS from a floppy is the way to go.

What do you experts think is the surest solution? 

System AMD 3000, 1 gig, 250 sata, 250 ide, DVD writer, 2 floppy drives, multi card readers.

George

OK I'll disconnect the drives and see how XP, Ghost 10, and Ghost 2003 boot.  Then I'll reconnect the drives individually and together and report back if that makes any difference.
Ghost 10 is backing up to the sata drive now on a fat 32 partition.
The PC is seeing heavy use at this time with school starting.
I'll look into planning a recovery stratagy using Ghost 2003.  A boot floppy, fdisk, and DOS always seems to work.  I believe I read that with Ghost 2003 one can write to NTSF partitions with DOS?
Thanks,
George